Journal of Korea TAPPI ISSN:0253-3200(Print) 펄프종이기술

The reduction of carbon dioxide emission is hot issue in the world because we are confronted with serious global warming and climate change. As a part of carbon dioxide reduction efforts, various approaches for increasing filler loading have been carried out in order to decrease the energy consumption in papermaking processes. Effects of the pretreatment of GCC with cationic starch and MFC on the flocculation behaviour of GCC were investigated in this study. Pretreatment of GCC with cationic starch caused the change of electric charge of suspension and flocculation behaviour of GCC. Largest flocculation size was obtained near the isoelectric point in the case of cationic starch treatment. When MFC (30 times grinded) was added after preflocculation of GCC with cationic starch, the flocculation size was increased, but largest flocculation size was obtained at –150 mV of electric charge of suspension in this study. However the addition of highly grinded MFC (60 times grinded) caused smaller flocculation size of GCC than those of MFC (30 times grinded). When GCC and MFC were mixed first, and then cationic starch was added, the characteristics of MFC and the change of electric charge which could be brought by cationic starch did not affect the flocculation size of GCC at all. The flocculation size obtained by the combination of cationic starch and MFC was smaller than those of cationic starch. These results show that flocculation behaviour could be controlled by the change of electric charge of suspension and the combination methods of cationic starch and MFC.